


Picking Up

by Missy



Category: How I Met Your Mother
Genre: Adoption, Developing Relationship, F/M, Getting Back Together, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-30
Updated: 2016-05-30
Packaged: 2018-07-11 04:56:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 556
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7029550
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Missy/pseuds/Missy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Barney and Robin get back together by degrees.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Picking Up

**Author's Note:**

> Set in the alternate ending where Tracy lives and Robin and Barney (implied) get back together.

He asks her if she wants to get back together inside of the Sears Tower after helping her through a hostile contract negotiation. She doesn’t hesitate to say yes this time, after everything they’ve both been through, after all of the time they’ve spent alone. So the yes comes with no conditions, no promises. They will see each other and feel each other out, a lion tamer and the wary, wide-eyed creature he seeks to tame.

He ask her if she’d like him to move in under the Hollywood sign in LA with a bottle of wine at his hip and a couple of hundred spotlights underlighting their eager faces. It won’t be his place or her place this time – it will be somewhere fresh and new, with room for the dogs and plenty of sunlight for everyone else. He will even bring his Stormtrooper outfit and shed the trappings of his bachelorhood. And Ellie – Ellie will be there on the weekends, and Robin will be something more to her than the weird aunt she sometimes has to put up with. This time, Robin takes a month to decide. She figures she’s earned the extra time. In the end they figure out once more how to work her dogs and his child into a single apartment, match her art and hockey memorabilia and his old trophies. They even buy a Robin Sparkles 45 and mount it to the wall. It’s time, Robin thinks, that she stopped running away from the past.

He proposes to her again at the base of a pyramid in Cairo. She takes awhile to think about it this time, but the results at the same. The desire is the same, the passion and the sense of fun. They’ve grown up just enough to understand where their home truly lies, and they know that they’re wasting time just circling each other when what they really want and love stands right before them. The sun is hot on her skin and in her mind as she says yes. She imagines the night before them and shudders with anticipation. It’s something that won’t make her autobiography when she gets off her butt and pitches it, but it’s something she’ll cherish more than that interview with Barbara Walters, or the time she met President Bieber and shared a carton of poutine with him. It’s something that defines the newness and the solidarity of them. 

They talk about adopting when Ellie goes to college, when the house is on its second set of dogs and they realize that their world, the amount of money they have, ought to be shared with someone far less fortunate than they. Robin suggests they adopt a ten-year old, someone the system’s trying to age out, someone who has less hope than she had when her father told her she was less than nothing because of her femininity, the way Barney felt when his first lover dumped him for being too nice. 

Anna is sixteen. Her mother abandoned her in a suitcase when she was four months old, and she’s been in the system ever since. 

When Barney and Robin see her, life seems to start all over again, careening in a new direction, a better one – and one they would have never reached if they’d’ve never given each other another chance.


End file.
